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Authentic African Culture in Honduras? Afro-Central Americans Challenge Honduran Indo-Hispanic Mestizaje Sarah England Departmen

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Authentic African Culture in Honduras? Afro-Central Americans Challenge Honduran Indo-Hispanic Mestizaje Sarah England Departmen Authentic African Culture in Honduras? Afro-Central Americans Challenge Honduran Indo-Hispanic Mestizaje Sarah England Department of Anthropology University of California, Davis [email protected] Mark Anderson Department of Anthropology University of Texas, Austin [email protected] Paper prepared for presentation at the XXI Latin American Studies Association International Congress, September 24-27, Chicago. 1 Authentic African Culture in Honduras? Afro-Central Americans Challenge Honduran Mestizaje In April of 1997, the Garifuna commemorated the 200th year anniversary of their arrival to the shores of Central America with the Garifuna Bicentennial Celebration in La Ceiba, Honduras. The week-long event included cultural performances, art exhibits, and symposia meant to display the unique origins of the Garifuna as maroons who escaped slavery to mix with native Caribs on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, forming an Afro-Indigenous culture in the 1600s that existed outside of the Caribbean plantation slavery system. The Garifuna were exiled from this island homeland in 1797 by the British, who shipped them to the Caribbean coast of Central America where they established villages in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The arrival of these Garifuna ancestors to the shores of Central America was re-enacted on the final day of the Bicentennial, along with the erection of a statue of the "paramount chief" Satuye, who perished while resisting the British on St. Vincent. Like many of the Bicentennial events, this final substantiation in metal of a founding father/hero served to emphasize the roots of the Garifuna as a people in St. Vincent, uniting them as an ethnic nation through a common culture, language, and ancestral homeland that is both of the Americas and deeply connected to Africa. Though this history on St. Vincent allows the Garifuna to claim both Native American and African ancestry, the Bicentennial was clearly a celebration of blackness. The pervading aesthetic of the event was an identification with the African Diaspora as evidenced in the abundance of dreadlocks, cowry shell earrings, Senegalese clothing, and Bob Marley T-shirts, alongside the usual Nike high tops, basketball jerseys, Tommy Hilfiger shirts, and other attire associated with the African American youth culture already popular among Garifuna transmigrants returning from the US. Participants traveled from Central and South America and the US representing Garifuna, Afro-Latino, and African-American organizations to speak on panels dealing with issues of racism, land expropriation, economic development, and political empowerment. In his opening address the president of the National Coordinator of Black 2 Organizations in Honduras (which co-coordinated the event with the Bicentennial Committee of the US, based in New York City) told the audience that the Bicentennial served as an opportunity for Garifuna to recognize a common history of discrimination and marginalization with other blacks in the Americas, and to form economic and political alliances that would empower them in the current era of globalization. Within this call to political and cultural affinity among blacks of the Americas however, the Garifuna were often represented as being the most "authentic" blacks in the Americas due to their history as a free people whose culture had not developed under the yoke of slavery. Indeed the featured report on the Bicentennial appearing in Diaspora: A Global Black Magazine (published in New York City) consistently lauded the Garifuna as having "authentic African culture in its untouched and undiluted form" (John-Sandy 1997:27), a bastion of cultural, spiritual, and linguistic conservation, a shining example to all members of the African Diaspora looking for real African culture in the Americas. Two days after the grand finale of the Bicentennial an editorial appeared in the Honduran newspaper El Tiempo, written by Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, the Honduran Minister of Culture. In response to the obvious afrocentricity of the Bicentennial he wrote: (I must) remind the Garifuna where they come from. One cannot invent oneself according to ones whim or preference. To try to pass as African is just as questionable for a Garifuna as it would be for [President] Carlos Roberto Reina to dress like a Lenca or for me to presume to be a Briton or a Pech Indian just because I have these ancestors. Like all other Hondurans, the Garifuna are mestizos, from the Arawak Indian and the African black. To pass as the product of just one of these ancestors is to falsify ones identity, to forget the other complimentary component, to betray the ancestors which they are trying to erase from their collective historical birth certificate. To locate ones identity in history is easy but absolutely insufficient (Monday, April 14, 1997). In the current moment in which Latin American states are espousing a politics of multiculturalism that celebrates cultural difference, why would the Minister of Culture be concerned with the growing tendency of Garifuna organizations to identify with blackness, while minimizing their indigenous heritage? Why does it matter whether the Garifuna locate their identity in Africa, St. Vincent, or Central America; as black, indigenous, or mestizo? What are 3 the political stakes involved in this excavation of history and construction of identity for Garifuna social movements? These comments must be understood as taking place at a time when both black and indigenous organizations in Honduras have become increasingly vocal in demanding the legal protection and titling of community lands, bilingual education, economic opportunities, political representation, and the protection of basic human rights. The most dramatic displays of this activism have been a series of marches on the capital, in which indigenous and black organizations (sometimes jointly and sometimes separately) have mobilized busloads of protesters from their villages, camped for days in the central plaza, burned effigies of Columbus, and carried out religious rituals for the ancestors in front of the presidential palace. Indeed the Bicentennial was much more than a celebration of ethnic nationalism, but was also a time to make public the political and economic demands of Garifuna organizations vis-à-vis Central American states. This activism and these spectacles of cultural difference have brought the issues of racial discrimination and multiculturalism to the fore of national debate, challenging the formerly hegemonic elite, academic, and state ideology that Honduras is a homogenous mestizo nation, where race is not an issue of social concern. Pressured by indigenous and black activism from below, and by an international political arena from above increasingly sympathetic to the plight of "indigenous and tribal" peoples in the world, the Honduran state has responded with a series of gestures towards recognizing Honduras as a multi-ethnic nation and towards protecting the economic, cultural, and human rights of ethnic peoples. Though "ethnic rights" have been extended to all of the eight groups considered to be ethnic in Honduras (this includes six indigenous groups, the Garifuna, and the Bay Island Black Creoles), the place of blacks in the ideological debate around cultural difference and national identity in Honduras has been ambivalent and contradictory due to the persistence of an ideology of mestizaje that has tried to erase blackness from the national identity. Though Honduran mestizaje recognizes Africans as one of the three racial confluence present in the colonial period contributing to the modern mestizo, this element of the national racial/cultural subject is 4 minimized. Rather, the Honduran national subject is presented as primarily a result of the fusion of the indigenous with the Spanish, generating an "indo-hispanic mestizaje" that promotes a celebration of the indigenous/autocthonous as the roots of the national identity. This notion of being the original inhabitants, the roots of the nation is currently the basis upon which ethnic groups in Honduras are able to claim rights to land and cultural autonomy vis-à-vis a state that is trying to reinscribe multiculturalism into a new nationalist project. This has interesting consequences for Afro-Hondurans who are organizing alongside indigenous peoples, claiming rights as ethnic "nations" with roots in the nation-state of Honduras, while simultaneously stressing their alliance with a global racial identity of blackness. As the Minister of Culture's comments imply, locating Garifuna roots in Africa or St. Vincent proves risky for claiming rights in a country where blackness is still located outside of the national identity. Consequently, the way that Garifuna organizations have articulated their identity vis-à-vis Honduran national society and state reactions to these discourses of identity provide an interesting case for understanding the multiple and contradictory ways that mestizaje operates as a nationalist discourse in Honduras. In this paper we trace the politics of identity among Honduran Garifuna social movements, comparing it with those of indigenous groups and other Afro-Hondurans. We argue that the debates around Garifuna identity reveal tensions between the tropes of "indianness," "blackness," "mestizaje," and "hondureño" as metaphors of sameness and difference, state nationalism and ethnic nationalism, belonging and exclusion. Each of these tropes is mobilized at different moments in the negotiation of rights
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